I read Philosophy and Economics at St John's College Oxford, where I also took a D. Phil. From 1978, I worked for 6 years in the Department of Health and Social Security, in policy and computer branches. Here I helped to set up a large Demonstrator project under the Alvey program to investigate the applicability of Knowledge Based Systems techniques to large legislation based organisations. In 1984 I left the DHSS to go to Imperial College, London, to research into logic programming applied to legislation. I was appointed lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Liverpool in 1987, Senior Lecturer in 1992, and Reader in Computer Science in 1999.

I am interested in all aspects of knowledge based systems, particularly their application to law. Current focus is on dialogue and argument, ontologies, and verification and validation.

I became interested in dialogue in the early 1990s attempting to improve the explanation of the reasoning of KBS through the use of formal dialogue games. After investigating Mackenzies DC, I began to experiment with variations of Toulmin's schema. Since then I have become increasingly interested in dialogueand argument as a means of exploring the role of procedure in legal argument, modelling disagreement in law, modelling defeasible arguments, and in modelling the specific uses of cases in legal reasoning. Most recently I have been working on the incorporation of teleological legal reasoning into this framework.

I am currently a doctorate student in my third and last year at The University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Dave Robertson and John Lee. I got a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1994 and a MSc degree in Applied Mathematics in 1996, both from The University of São Paulo (Brazil), and I have been focusing my research in Artificial Intelligence since then. My MSc dissertation, entitled `Annotated Logic Programming: Theory and Applications', was awarded third place at the X Thesis and Dissertation Contest of the Brazilian Computer Society, in 1997. My PhD research is about describing dynamic aspects in formal argumentation - e.g. how to revise and strengthen and argument in order to defend it from an attack - and exploring these aspects in problems in the knowledge engineering domain, such as multi-agent negotiation.

I grew up in San Diego, California, and I did most of my early thinking on the beaches there. I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, and I wrote a senior thesis on William James's theory of consciousness and self. I received my doctorate from the University of California, San Diego with a dissertation on Heidegger. My first published article was on mood in argumentation and drew from Heidegger. My second publication was on Perelman's conception of the standard of rationality for argumentation--the universal audience. Partly on the basis of this early work, I was hired by the University of Oregon (USA) to teach graduate students how to teach written reasoning to undergraduates. Out of this work, came a book, The Rhetoric of Reason (1996), which I called in the introduction "an affirmation of reason by way of a reconstruction of the theory of argumentation." The book responded to the skepticism about reason and argumentation that was relatively widespread in U.S. English departments. The book further develops the rhetorical conception of reason found in Perelman, and it also articulates that conception with the general project of a liberal arts education. My work in argumentation continues to be informed very strongly by Perelman, somewhat less directly but still, I think, fairly deeply by Heidegger, and also focuses more than usual on the ethical dimensions of reason and argument. My latest efforts are (1) a paper exploring the concept of burden of proof in connection with Perelman's concept of inertia in argumentation (developed for the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Meeting, 1999) and an address on Argument and Ethics (in the context of the teaching of written argumentation), published by the Center of the Teaching of Writing at the University of Oregon.

• Applications of deontic logic in computer science, in particular
• representation of and reasoning with policies and regulations;
• modelling of norm-governed dynamic systems;
• applications to security and specification.
• Multi-agent systems, in particular
• agent representation;
• models of negotiation and agreement between co-operating autonomous agents;
• distributed knowledge management.
• Models of organisations as normative systems.
• Formal Aspects of Business and Electronic Commerce, in particular
• speech-act theory formalisations for communication;
• verification and debugging of trade protocols.

John Fox was educated at Durham and Cambridge Universities, and then worked in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive sciences at Carnegie-Mellon and Cornell Universities in the USA. On returning to the UK in 1975 he took up a post with the Medical Research Council, for whom he worked on clinical decision making and computer-based decision support systems. In 1981 he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's laboratories in London, where he set up the Advanced Computation Laboratory. His group carries out research that straddles medical software engineering and related research in cognitive and computer sciences. Professor Fox has been responsible for many projects funded by UK and European research programmes, including the well-known DILEMMA and PROMPT projects. He has published widely in computing, medical engineering and cognitive science, and was founding editor of the Knowledge Engineering Review (Cambridge University Press). His most recent publication is Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications with Subrata Das (AAAI and MIT Press, 2000). In 1996 his group was awarded the Laureate Medal of the European Federation of Medical Informatics for work on PROforma, a formal language and development technology for building intelligent software agents. Fox is an honorary professor of computer science and psychology at University College, London.

James B. Freeman is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College of The City University of New York, where he teaches primarily logic in both the philosophy and mathematics departments. His early work dealt with formal logic, in particular the algebra of modal and relevant predicate logic and investigations into formal ontology. The latter was done in collaboration with Prof. Charles B. Daniels of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Since coming to Hunter in 1978, his primary research area has concerned informal logic and argumentation theory. After publishing an informal logic text, Thinking Logically: Basic Concepts for Reasoning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988, second edition 1993), he has turned his attention to theoretical issues raised by informal logic. One principal concern has been argument macrostructure, attempting to integrate the circle and arrow diagramming account current in many informal logic texts with Toulmin's layout of arguments. This has resulted in the publication of his monograph Dialectics and the Macrostructure of Arguments (Berlin and New York: Foris Publications, 1991). A second principal concern is developing an epistemological theory of premise acceptability in terms of warrant, justification, and epistemic presumption. A monograph is in progress. Two papers may be of particular interest to participants in the Symposium on Argument and Computation:

Michael A. Gilbert was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1974. After teaching for two years at the University of Toronto, he was hired by York University in 1975, and he is now a Professor of Philosophy at that institution.

Gilbert published the first edition of How to Win an Argument with McGraw-Hill in 1979, with the second edition coming out in 1996 from John Wiley and Sons. In the 1980s he published two novels, Office Party and Yellow Angel, and had his adaptation of the former produced as a film entitled Hostile Takeover in 1989. He then turned his attention back to Argumentation Theory and began to articulate a theory of coalescent argumentation, an agreement-based approach to argumentation that takes seriously the inclusion of non-logical modes of argument and communication. He is currently the holder of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant for the study of the role of emotion in argumentation. Gilbert also does research in gender and transgender theory.

Rod Girle graduated from the University of Queensland with a research Masters in Epistemic Logic, and completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews. He took up a lectureship in Philosophy at Queensland. His work in computing was prompted by an interest in Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) for Introductory Formal Logic. After gaining research funds for Logic CAL at the University of Queensland, he developed an interest in HCI (Human Computer Interface) design. Dialogue Logic seemed to be the best theoretical basis for interface design. From 1988 to 1991 he worked at the Automated Reasoning Project at the Australian National University, and became acquainted with both non-classical logic and Belief Revision. Work since has focussed on the synthesis of these diverse areas.

Having studied law at the Universities of Frankfurt and Gottingen, I passed my Legal State Examination and then continued my studies in the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). There I received my LL.M. degree with a thesis on "The Less-Restrictive-Alternative Principle as an Argument in Constitutional Decisions of the United States Supreme Court", and went on to complete my J.S.D. degree in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Having obtained my doctorate, I became an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Speech Communication at Oregon State University and of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San Jose State University, where I also teach in the Humanities Honors Program.

As the subject of my doctoral thesis as well as my subsequent teaching and research indicate, my central interest focusses on the historical and theoretical analysis of public argument in general, and of legal rhetoric in particular. Two aspects of that interest are reflected in the two parts of my dissertation, which moves from a historical investigation of the development of basic external structures of legal argumentation in typical social and political settings to a discussion of the relections of this development in the internal systematic structure of modern legal argumentation.

In my dissertation I endeavoured to bring together legal, rhetorical, philosophical, linguistic, and political perspectives which are often kept seperate by traditional disciplinary boundaries, but are actually deeply connectedby shared structures of argumentation. Proceeding from this interdisciplinary basis, my work has moved in two major directions.

On the one hand, I have embarked on a series of studies which examine the history of legal rhetoric, with a particular emphasis on the medieval period, which saw the emergence of field-specific patterns of legal persuasion in a literature which has yet to be studied from a perspective centrally focused on rhetoric. While it is clear that forensic persuasion occupied a central place in classical rhetorical theory, the role of rhetoric in the energence of a specialised scholarly treatment of of the law in the revival of jurisprudence in the Middle Ages is less well understood. In spite of some early recognition of the connnection between legal and rhetorical studies which obtained in the School of Law at Bologna, legal historians intent unpon emphasising the autonomy of the discipline and its characteras a science of law have on the whole been reluctant to pursue this connection further. Thus recent studies of this formative phase of the Western legal tradition tend to discuss rhetoric only in passing or not at all. Insofar as the links of legal methodology with the liberal arts are studied, the emphasis is on dialectic, while the shifting boundaries and exchanges between this field and the study of argumentation in rhetoric, which is already apparent in the partial overlap between dialectical and rhetorical topoi in Aristotle, receives less attention. Overly narrow and negative views of rhetoric as limited to stylistic devices, less rational modee of persuasion, or questions of factual proof, ignoring the central role of argumentative invention related to all aspects of law in rhetorical theory, reinforce this neglect.

On the other hand, I have pursued the political and theoretical implications of legal rhetoric in a number of papers which focus on the continued relevance of status theory for contemporary legal argumentation and on the legitimating function of judicial interpretive rhetoric; some of these proceed from a historical starting point, while others address these issues from a more exclusively contemporary perspective.

For a brief introduction to these two aspects of my work, I suggest the following three essays.

ERIK C.W. KRABBE (1943) studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. His Ph.D. dissertation, Studies in Dialogical Logic (Groningen, 1982) was supervised by E.M. Barth and refereed by K. Lorenz. He is co-author, with E.M. Barth, of From Axiom to Dialogue: A Philosophical Study of Logics and Argumentation (Walter de Gruyter, 1982) and the author of about sixty publications, most of them in the field of dialogue logic and argumentation. Krabbe is an alumnus of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a member of the editorial board of Argumentation. He taught logic at the University of Amsterdam (1969-1971) and at Utrecht University (1971-1988). Since 1988 he has been an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy of Groningen University, teaching both philosophical and mathematical logic and theory of argumentation. In 1995 he was appointed extraordinary professor in the field of philosophical theory of argumentation. Another book on dialogue theory, written jointly with D.N. Walton, was published in 1995: Commitment in Dialogue. Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning (State University of New York Press). In 1998 Krabbe received the ISSA-award for 1996.

I have an Honours degree and University Medal in Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics from the Australian National University, Canberra. I am currently embarked on a PhD in artificial intelligence under Simon Parsons at the University of Liverpool. My research aim here is the design of intelligent systems capable of autonomous reasoning about the consequences of actions, and I am using dialectical argumentation to achieve this. My interest in this area is part of a wider interest in non-probabilistic formalisms for representing uncertainty and for decision-making, particularly formalisms using qualitative and argumentation approaches. I believe these approaches have potential application to many "hard" problems in so-called "soft" disciplines, such as forecasting demand for new products and the design of hypothesis-testing procedures in the bio-medical sciences.

Dr Norman is a lecturer in the Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from University College London in 1997. His postdoctoral research at Queen Mary and Westfield College and The University of Aberdeen has ranged from the development of formal models for specifying the behaviour of multi-agent systems to their application in real-world problems. From a theoretical perspective, the research focus is on understanding how social commitments between agents are established and managed, how social relationships affect individual decision-making, and how issues such as delegation and responsibility may be captured (e.g. through the use of Hamblin's work on imperatives). He is at present involved in a number of projects including a research council funded project on the automatic generation of contracts between agents.

In my academic development I have gradually moved from law via philosophy to logic and artificial intelligence. I received master degrees in law (1985) and philosophy (1988) at the University of Groningen, and a PhD degree at the law department of the Free University Amsterdam (1993). My doctoral dissertation was titled `Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument', and was published in revised and updated form with Kluwer in 1997, with the subtitle `A study of Defeasible Reasoning in Law'. After obtaining my PhD degree I spent a year at the department of computing of Imperial College London, and then returned to the Free University Amsterdam for postdoc positions at the law department (1994-1997) and the computer science department (1997-1998). In October 1998 I moved to the computer science department of Utrecht University, to become a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence.

My main research interests are Artificial Intelligence applied to law, and formal models of defeasible reasoning. I have combined these interests in formal studies of dialectical legal argument. Recently I have become more widely interested in models of argument in dialogue, for applications in multi-agent systems, intelligent tutoring, and automated mediation of discussion and collective decision making.